


take up the torch

by sweetwatersong



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Library, Books, Gen, Happy Ending, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:13:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28825026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetwatersong/pseuds/sweetwatersong
Summary: The red in her ledger is spread out across a hundred books, tucked into a thousand poems. The truth of her past is broken into fragments to make sure in her next life she remembers. To make sure she is ready.In the snow, in the quiet, one librarian has gathered them all. It's time to wake up again.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 9
Kudos: 16





	take up the torch

She stands poised on the edge of the sidewalk, fingers cold where they are gripped around her phone. The text from her roommate apologizing for leaving her stranded in the sudden storm hangs unread on her lock screen.

"God damn it." Her lips bite off the edges of the words cleanly, precise like scalpels, shining and steel like surgical tools. She cannot control the storm, cannot control the roads, but she can control this much. She's always been good at controlling herself.

The librarian stays tucked into the entryway, shoulders braced under his dark jacket, while the wind scatters drifts higher than her knees across the parking lot and the bus stop that will be empty for hours to come.

"Come back inside," he tells her when the snowflakes begin to catch in the curls of her red hair, collecting and running like ice down the nape of her neck.

Slowly, flushed with anger and dismay, she does.

-

“These look interesting." She surveys the books piled up on the librarian's desk, his hands caressing each like an old friend. Her interest had been piqued by the age of the volumes and their variety. If there was a pattern she couldn't guess it off-hand; it seemed a jumble of titles and subjects that can have no possible connection. _Budapest, Children's and Household Tales, The Art of Dramatic Writing_. Her own hands are small on the bindings as she glances through them, hovering over surnames and covers with care but not recognition. “Why do you have them?”

"Because they have something in common,” he replies quietly. There's an air of expectation that makes the skin between her shoulder blades prickle. "Since we’ve got time to kill until the snowplows can dig out my car, why don’t you see if you can figure it out?”

"Is that a challenge?" She asks him, amused and intrigued all at once. The tea cup sitting beside her, the grad school homework tucked into her backpack, the slouch of his knit sweater; there is something comforting about them, how they are a solid presence in a world where nor'easters can spin up in minutes, can sweep in from thin air.

He raises a single eyebrow, his answer clear in the quirk of his lips.

_Of course._

She considers the stacks, weighing _Russian Fairy Tales_ in her hand as the reassuring air of the library wraps itself around her shoulders and warms her, grounds her.

There are worst ways to pass a few hours, and besides. This feels familiar, this feels expected, like she's been waiting for this all of her twenty-six years of life. It doesn't make sense, but it does, and she opens the first book to its title page.

-

"Clint," she gasps, the word a stone and anchor on her tongue even as her fingers dig into the desk. There are hands on hers, gripping her wrists, keeping her upright, but as soon as she opens her eyes the librarian pulls away and steps back, holding his hands out to show he means her no harm.

Natasha chokes on a throat gone dry with winter's cold, swallows a laugh too bitter and weak to be let out, because it's _Clint_. There's never been a life in which he truly meant her harm, and if he ever did he would need to catch her at a worse point than remembering her oath to the Torch. Remembering her life - lives - life?

It's too much, the memories swirling and jostling in the eaves of her mind for space, for order. She drags her focus onto the books scattered in front of her, staring desperately at the black and white print as her mind struggles to contain itself. Herself. _Her_. It's always been her. All of this is her.

Like the snow falling outside everything finally settles, soft and quiet, as the memories imprinted in the book fall into place.

"Did you find yourself?" Clint asks when she's calmed. His voice is intent and hopeful and not quite right, off enough that another laugh dies on her lips when she looks, truly _looks_ at him. It's his face, his hands, his shoulders under the thick sweater. But there's an emptiness in the corners of his mouth where his self-deprecating humor should be hiding. There's a lack of lines on his face from the ever-present awareness of his surroundings and its threats. There aren't any shadows to his gaze. It's Clint and it's not.

She wonders if she would have that same sense of unsettling déjà vu if she were to take out the IDs in her backpack and thumb through them, looking at the girl who had been Natasha Romanoff until she woke up.

Until she was _woken_ up.

"Yes."

Relief passes over his face, unmistakable and endearing, even as this not-Clint relaxes.

"Then it's possible. Then you did it."

"Clint," she starts to say and cuts off, another girl's loose cardigan hanging off her shoulders, a pea-coat she has never purchased chafing her neck. He sits down in his chair, slumps against the back of it with gratitude and ease. "Have you?" Natasha asks instead, already seeing another table full of books in her mind's eye, _Robin Hood_ and _The Far Side_ and _Lord of the Rings_ opened to let his memories out.

But he hesitates, stills, shakes his head slowly.

"I can't find the books."

_How can you know,_ Natasha wants to ask, _how can you say what books are the ones you need? _And yet the multitude of tomes in front of her is reply enough, the torch on their bindings a flame in the night; a promise against the destruction that is coming.__

____

____

"Doesn’t matter," he continues, dismissing himself in a way that makes her sick to her heart. "You're back. You're going to be okay."

Natasha swallows, lips tasting of a chap-stick she's never used before, and all the words fall to ashes in her mouth.

-

There is no set pattern to their wakings, scattered as they are across the millennia, but there is always a rhythm that feels like the truth. For the two of them it is as simple as the Hawk waking the Spider, as forever standing side by side to help the Torch of Alexandria rage against the darkness. It's the first life where he hasn't remembered before her, though. In the long stretch of her memories it feels like a tenuous foothold. Like a moment where one misstep will lose him forever.

Like last time they may have saved enough of humanity, and yet not enough of his memories.

"How did you know?" She asks in the pale blue glow before dawn, the night air cutting through her coat. He shrugs.

"I don't know. I just knew they told your story. It was scattered, yeah, just bits and pieces stashed here and there. Maybe the authors didn't know what they were doing, or maybe they always meant to bring you back. But when I started reading, I knew what I was looking for, and I kept looking until I found you."

_How,_ Natasha wants to know, fingers curling into fists, _when your own story isn't here, when you could have no memory of who I am to you?_ But this not-Clint is standing by the door, her backpack in his calloused hands and a lopsided touch to his lips, and the answers to her questions will not come.

She has looked, hunting volumes through the university library with nothing more than a vague sense of rightness for what is needed this time around, and despite all her efforts she has no more than a dozen books. If he's right, if they didn't write down enough of his story to make it complete in this era, if the memories she needs were excised or lost and never replaced -

"I'll find you," she promises softly, taking the backpack from his hands with its burden of books she won't let out of her sight. He nods in that rocking motion she knows so well, amused and knowing and already two steps ahead in the game, but this isn't a game.

He's never been a game to her.

"I'm okay," Clint tells her, without alien inflections, with that heart-wrenching voice. "I am, 'Tasha."

When Natasha freezes, from more than the cold on the wind or the snow, he cups her face and runs his thumb over her cheekbone.

"Stay safe," he whispers, and vanishes back beneath the surface of a stranger.

She leaves with her mind and her soul intact, snow catching in her hair as she makes her way to the waiting Uber, and in the curve of her heart there is a fire that has never died.

-

Ten months later she arrives with the first winter storm, a satchel full of priceless books slung over one shoulder, to look up into a face both familiar and strange.

"I found you," Natasha says, triumphant and fierce, and steps inside.


End file.
